Researchers at the University of Kansas have found out that it is good to get emotional after a failure and this helps you improve next time when you get to tackle the similar task. This holds true for people responding emotionally to failure than cognitively.

This theory can now change our way of thinking about failures. Apprehending how performance varies when you concentrate on feelings vs thoughts could influence the way you think about the failures or the way companies think about their employees' failures.

The researchers carried three experiments on the undergraduate students who were required to perform three tasks. In the first task, students were asked to search the internet for a hand blender that could come for the cheapest price and they could win a cash prize for that. This task was rigged and the computer declared that the lowest price was $3.27 less than what the participants discovered. So, the participants failed in the first task.

The participants were requested to concentrate on emotions. Some learned the results and others their cognitive response like thinking the reason logically why they failed the task.

In the next similar task, participants who focused on emotional response used more effort on the task than who responded cognitively.

This proves that people who feel bad themselves when they fail have more chances to succeed in the next similar task than people who search for the logic behind the failure.

The results are fairly frank as they showed that enabling yourself to think bad or even concentrate on negative emotions after a failure will help oversee future decision-making in a positive way, at least in the similar task.

The findings are useful to people themselves, employers, teachers or anyone who deals with handling failure in decision-making

Researchers also said that the future research would focus on segregating certain sorts of emotions and thoughts as specific emotions are more efficient than others, and some types of thoughts could hurt or help more than others.

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About Praveen PenugondaHave interests in multiple aspects and write articles on Technology, Lifestyle and Finance. Tracking developments since the launch of Nokia 1100 and completion of Human Genome Project